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The front rail plays an important role in the performance of body-on-frame (BOF) vehicles in frontal crashes. New developments in materials and forming technology have led to the exploration of different configurations to improve crash performance. This paper presents the initial stages of an ongoing study to investigate the effects of the cross section of steel columns on crash performance in automotive applications. Because accurate prediction of the performance of these rails can help reduce the amount of physical crash testing necessary, the focus of this paper is on appropriate testing and modeling procedures for different rail configurations. In the first part of this paper, the Finite Element Analysis (FEA) methodology is presented with respect to correlation with real world tests. The effects of various parameters are described, along with the optimum configuration for model correlation.